Lewis Lost: The Chronicles of Narnia: Prince Caspian

By Keith Uhlich

The very real wonders of the first Chronicles of Narnia adaptation from Walt Disney Pictures and Walden Media (The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe) are all but lost in the follow-up, Prince Caspian. Corporatizing C.S. Lewis' popular fantasy world (turning it, in effect, into a Tolkien-by-way-of-Jackson blockbuster) was something of a sticky proposition to begin with, but director/co-writer Andrew Adamson got by in the first film, sublimating the instinct to go Shrek savvy and sticking close to Lewis' slow-build reveal of the Christian allegorical otherworld, Narnia. Overwrought CGI bombast was certainly in evidence, but it was tempered by a variety of perverse, highly personal touches, from the opening Blitz bombing (a literal fall from the heavens), which ably sets up the disparate dynamics of the four Pevensie siblings (William Moseley, Anna Popplewell, Skander Keynes, and Georgie Henley), to a nutball appearance by Santa Claus, pulling weapons out of his sack and offering up Aesop moral witticisms as if he were Q arming James Bond.
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